


Life is Bizarre

by americanbarbarian



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game), ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 | JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Genre: "Fun" with Pronouns, Crossover, Dadtaro, F/F, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kujo Jotaro Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Kujo Jotaro is Bad at Feelings, Not Beta Read, One Shot, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:36:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29627139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/americanbarbarian/pseuds/americanbarbarian
Summary: A battle-weary marine biologist is taking a quick breather at a gas station before he breaks his daughter out of prison. A young woman is taking a quick breather at a gas station as she travels anywhere to try and deal with what she's seen and done.Major Stone Ocean spoilers, and the same for Life is Strange 1.There are a lot of interesting parallels between these two, I think, and I've tried to explore a couple. Think "Waiting for Godot", but with two traumatized characters.
Relationships: Kujo Jolyne & Kujo Jotaro, Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Life is Bizarre

**Author's Note:**

> "Do you believe in 'gravity'?"  
> \--Dio Brando, to a young Enrico Pucci
> 
> "What kind of world does this? Who DOES this?!"  
> \--Chloe Price, to Max Caulfield

Slouched down on the old wood bench with his hat pulled low over his eyes, he blew a slow, constant stream of smoke into the humid, salty air outside the gas station. He’d given up smoking just before his daughter was born, but as their relationship deteriorated – _and whose fault was that,_ he asked himself automatically – he found himself more and more tempted to return to the habit he’d picked up in high school. He supposed it was a crutch, and he knew it had already taken years off his life, but shit, he was lucky to have lived this long; he didn’t care about addiction or heart disease, as much as he grimly acknowledged their consequences. As a matter of fact, he didn’t care about much of anything anymore. Except for her.

“Got a light?”

His eyebrows shot up, and he lifted the brim of his hat, squinting at the dark shape that was standing above him and blocking the Florida sun. It was a girl – _couldn’t be much older than her_ – holding out a cigarette. For a moment his mind went into overdrive, panicked, looking around for danger, but he managed to settle his instincts with nary a twitch of his face. Still, it unsettled him that she’d managed to sneak up on him, and so casually, too. No one had done that in years.

After a moment of study, he wordlessly pulled out a lighter, held it up, and flicked it. It was a fancy-looking Thing of Gold, the girl thought as she lit her cigarette. It was as outlandishly fashionable as the rest of his outfit, with two Japanese characters, 空 条, engraved in the side, in a starry silver ink. She would’ve liked to take his picture. Clearly, this was a man with story after story, not to mention a uniquely confident fashion sense; but she could tell from a glance that she was already pushing it as she sat down on the rotting bench beside him.

When he was a teenager, he would’ve yelled at her to scare her away. Ten years ago – heck, ten minutes ago – he would’ve wordlessly gotten up and continued his journey, which was so close to its conclusion. But he could feel a certain pull coming from this girl, a gravitational potential of some sort, and it felt not only natural but inevitable that they would share a moment or two.

Of course, that didn’t mean he’d speak to her first. She interrupted _him_ , after all.

She felt it too, the strange gravity. She was really just stopping here to get more gas before heading up the East Coast on her meandering, pointless, cathartically lonesome road trip. But now, sitting next to this strange man, she felt everything coming to a head inside her long-disorganized mind.

She knew she had all the time she needed. She could go back whenever she wanted.

He knew he had all the time he needed. He could take a break whenever he wanted.

After a couple drags, she spoke.

“Can I give you a choice?”

Still half-sitting, half-laying against the bench, he remained silent, looking at the people filling up their tanks, going about their perfectly normal lives.

“I mean a hypothetical,” she clarified.

It was clear she was waiting for an answer now. “Mm,” he grunted. It was the best he cared to do. He wasn’t here for her, after all; he was here for _her_.

She took another long drag, her mind visibly setting pieces in place before she spoke. “Sophie-style. No good answers, so no wrong ones, either.”

She set the hand that held her cigarette down on her knee and stared at it. She was now fully wrapped in memories, and paid no attention to what her eyes were telling her.

“There’s someone you love,” she said, in a voice just above a whisper, “more than anything. Who brings your life joy, pride – _purpose._ You would lose anything,” she almost choked a moment, “do anything for them.”

He blinked. Was it a trick of the light, a coincidence, or had all the patrons of the pumps just done everything they were doing twice?

“Anything,” she continued, “but you have a choice. Her being alive – them being alive—”

He was sure now. The same thing. _Whatever_ , he thought; she didn’t mean him any harm, clearly. And he’d been through worse.

“—requires you to save them. But saving them means definitely causing the deaths of a bunch more people.”

She paused, lost in her memories. She didn't know why she was asking him of all people, but she was drawn to it, like water to a drain. There was no other path.

His brow was furrowed, stormy.

He grunted, and she jumped a little bit. “I’m breaking my daughter out of prison today.”

The meaning passed through her mind, but she just accepted it after a moment or two. She’d done worse, of course. And she knew people who’d gotten away with much, _much_ worse than that.

“That one?” she asked, pointing across the bay to a complex of dull, thin-windowed buildings. They were squat and huddled, with barbed wire around and among them.

He grunted again.

They both fell back to their thoughts.

_Breaking her out of prison_ , she thought. Certainly she’d have done it for her, in a heartbeat; and there was no question she would have done it for her in turn. But now that she’d made her choice, there was nothing more she could sacrifice for her, nothing more she could do to show her love. If she hadn’t insisted that she make the selfless choice, that she save all the others, she doubted she would’ve had the strength to do it. As it was, she was only able to let go after what felt like forever in her arms, sobbing and wailing, grieving a world that never existed, a world that never could exist, and the woman she loved, who Fate cruelly insisted on taking for its own.

_A bunch more people,_ he thought. He’d never been the introspective type, but that stuck with him more than he was comfortable with, and he asked himself why. His mind quickly wandered, as was so often its wont lately, to all the violent, maybe-preventable deaths he’d seen in the last few decades. A young man whose chest held the sky. A wise man, wiped clean for another. A poor, noble dog, valiant to the last. An innocent child, about whom no one knew the truth. A young girl, a hero in her last moments, and later too. A quiet woman, devoted to her craft, who he barely knew. A quiet man, devoted to his craft, incorrigibly horrific to his last. What would he give for any of them?

What would he give for her?

“ _THE WORLD_ ,” she heard him murmur. A ripple flowed in front of her eyes and through her mind, and everything froze.

Except for him, she noticed, as he wiped a tear from his eye without his expression changing a bit. And except for her, apparently, which he noticed when she turned her head to look at him in what should’ve been his world, and his world alone.

He looked at her with a flat expression, almost amused, almost angry, then back out at the pumps.

“ _Toki wo ugokidasu_.”

She looked back down at her lap, feeling ashamed.

“You saw it all, then,” she stated. It was the first time anyone had, but it didn’t surprise her much. She didn’t have much room in her for surprise anymore.

“Mm.”

“I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “I tell myself I shouldn’t, but it’s become a bad habit. It’s just so easy to—”

“I know.”

And she could tell that he did know what it was like, to carry a burden and only set it down when you know no one’s looking, because there’s no way they could understand, much less help. In hindsight, she supposed, it was silly of her to think that she was the only one in the world with her special little trick, or something like it. She half expected a fist to bump her shoulder, say “ _See? Not so lonely now, are you, Supermax?_ ” She’d point out the prison pun, and she’d punch her back. Then lay her head on her shoulder… “ _Great place for a romantic moment, weirdo_ ,” she’d point out.

“The world,” he said again. Differently this time. No ripple, no freeze. The customers kept moving. She looked at him, inquisitively.

“I would give the world for her.” His voice was lower than hers now, barely audible over the sounds of engines and the double- _chunk_ s of car doors slamming. “The universe. All of it.”

He finally looked at her again. “You didn’t, did you?” he said.

Her fist tightened, and she felt a phantom trickle of blood run down her upper lip. “No,” she confessed. “I didn’t.”

Whether the world actually froze or not, neither of them knew or cared.

“But only because she told me to,” she continued quietly. There were no other sounds to drown her out now.

“I don’t know if I could,” he said in a tone that combined precise clinicality and unusual vulnerability. It was not casual, but there was little emotion in it, either. His expression still hadn’t changed an inch. “Even if she told me to. I’m nowhere near that strong.”

She looked at him. His overcoat and loose pants left much to the imagination, but he was clearly better built than most anyone else she’d ever met – or seen, for that matter, and she’d just watched _Terminator_ last night to try and take her mind off things. She knew what he meant, and she appreciated the attempt at comfort. It meant a lot, coming from him. He who she’d known for all of a hundred seconds.

They continued to hold the world still together, unconsciously giving themselves time to breathe, to set down the things they carried. Silence reigned and nothing moved. Neither would have done it in the other’s presence, but the both of them saw it as inevitable, if they saw it at all. Two gravitational waves flowed between them, up, down, transverse and longitudinal, bearing more information than either could ever share. They sat, frozen in time, for what may have been an eternity.

But at the end of eternity, he rose, and time flowed once more. He walked to his car without looking back.

She picked up her camera and snapped a picture as he went. The ocean waves looked sculpted in stone behind him, and the green star on the back of his coat shone straight out of the photo, like a beacon on paper.

After a while, she too went back to her car and continued on her journey. There were no more waves left here. Their troubled seas had smoothed each other at least a little; their waveforms had intertwined, interacted, interfered, and the interaction left them both changed in innumerable ways. It would be too optimistic to say that either was healed by the experience.

But he touched a butterfly on his way into the prison. It flew north, not knowing where, and landed on her hood as she was stopped at a red light.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading my sloppy one-shot. I hope the various threads weren't too loose.
> 
> The heaviest part of Stone Ocean to me is that Jotaro chooses to save his daughter before literally everyone else in existence - and he gets killed for his trouble, punished for loving his daughter too much. Araki is a cruel master. (In close second, of course, is poor Emporio.)
> 
> How many oblique references did you spot?


End file.
